(25)Altair vs (4)Lara Croft vs (7)Kefka 2013
Results Round 2 Friday, August 23rd, 2013 Ulti's Analysis Kefka -- Legendary Contest Troll. It's one thing to beat Zack when everyone expected him to lose, but then he goes on to beat Altair in a match where many would have picked against him had they picked Kefka to beat Zack at all. On top of THAT, Kefka beat down this match so badly that Altair vs Lara Croft -- Altair vs Lara Croft!!! -- ended up being decided in the final minutes. This contest was really something else. First we see Crash overcome ten years of misery by going out like a winner despite last place in round 2, and then we see Lara Croft do the same. Her comeback was even more surprising too, given this was a day match against casualbait Assassin's Creed dude. But she never let him build a lead above 170, then started coming back once the evening vote hit. She managed to tie it up with a couple hours left before Altair was finally able to recover and win by 125, but Lara Croft being in a barnburner after being a running joke for 11 years is really something else. Do people actually like the Tomb Raider reboot? Did Lara and Altair LFF each other? Do people just hate Assassin's Creed? I have no real explanation for this outside of LFF, but the redemption was hella nice to see. You know what else was hella nice to see? KEFKA FINALLY IN ROUND 3 OF A NORMAL CONTEST! LAUGHING SPRITE PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICS!!! Get hype. Zen's (Late) Analysis After putting away Zack in Round 1, people still underestimated Kefka in this round. Altair was still seen as too strong to overcome, stronger than Zack I guess? While there were some in Kefka's corner, too many years of a negative stigma and the failure of Kefka to get to Round 3 despite being the main villain in perhaps the second most beloved FF of all time wasn't enough for a lot of people to consider a potential Kefka victory here. But, because it's fucking Kefka, he showed up ready to wreck brackets and destroy all of our perceptions. As if 2013 wasn't wild enough, we now had Kefka overcoming Zack and Altair to finally read round 3 to lose to GLaDOS. How did this happen? Well, it was 2013, 5 years past The Dark Knight. Altair was still pretty cool, I guess, but looking back, he was one of the most 2007 characters ever made. "Badass" generic white dude in hood who has a wrist blade and he's all in shadows and he dives off of buildings then he stabs you and god he's hot Altair is pretty bland, and I bring up the Dark Knight because that was the pinnacle of 2000s edginess. Everyone wanted to be Heath Ledger Joker, all dark and chaotic. Much like 90% of Halloween costumes in 2008 were Heath Ledger Jokers, I used to see people buying white hoodies and wearing them to high school with the hoods up and doing the Altair "push through crowds" thinking they were cool as heck. In 2013 it wasn't cool anymore and in 2018 people would laugh at you. You can see this in the immediate evolution of the AC protagonists to Ezio, who has an actual personality and a sarcastic sense of humor. Actually, every subsequent AC protagonist, even the "serious" ones have traces of Ezio or a Marvel movie. Altair probably wasn't helped by Lara, either. Being the face of Assassin's Creed, a major western franchise, and being put against Lara, the (prettier) face of a major western franchise, was going to drag Altair down. But this much? Well, yeah. It's Lara Croft. She was a 1-seed once because Ceej figured "everyone knows Lara Croft." And they do. Like they all know Pac-Man. Category:2013 Contest Matches